


Worsening

by thedastardly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, semi unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 11:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19722589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedastardly/pseuds/thedastardly
Summary: James thinks of a monster carrying him into its den, deep into the earth and warm and wet where it sleeps away the years. The north is in him now, in all of them, and his very marrow aches with ice and cold.





	Worsening

**Author's Note:**

> this probably barely counts as fitzcro but it's meant to be so i tagged it anyway
> 
> bits at the start and the last are from Three Poems By ANDRéS CERPA

_\- I’d like to put the night in a cage_

When he closes his eyes, James imagines the way the lead sits heavy inside him. A cherry pit, lodged somewhere in his back. Bending has become tiresome--moving in general, actually. The holes that have surfaced ache under his loose fitting shirts and jumpers. He feels small in them, swimming in clothes that had been tailored for his frame. He can feel the way his skin stretches taut over his spine, pulled tight like a canvas. His hair is a limp, greasy curtain around his face and he feels something inside him turn like salt in a cut, like fingers in a wound-

- _We are at the end of vanity._

He knows he is getting worse.

James cannot see them from where he sits on his cot, hands clasped between his knees, but he knows the arctic stars are steady in the night sky; steady like the powerful gas lamps outside the opera house, after the lamplighter boys set them aflame. To light the way for everyone else. 

There is symmetry in most things. Like in hearing ocean sounds in shells fished up from the sea floor. Those shells must ache for home, too, eternally singing for their return. Homesickness has a sound all its own, James realizes.

Everything was so easy at the beginning. Ice floes cracking under the weight and thrust of the ships, birdsong bouncing off the sails, hauling specimens for Goodsir. James can almost feel the cold air in his hair, on his face, turning to watch as the Terror sails silently behind them, thinking of her captain, his tea sitting in James’ own stores. 

James can’t remember the last time he met someone who didn’t take a liking to him almost immediately. Francis had clearly found him infuriating, and James in turn found Francis more important to please. More important than any other officer on either ship. 

Now, he _knows_ that Francis likes him and it’s too late to ever make anything of it. James hates the time they wasted, ticking by as the snow fell around them. He could have gone to him, sent Jopson away for a moment and wiped sweat from his brow, like some woman in a biblical painting, doting and forlorn, as the candle fluttered over them.

A golden memento mori.

He could have witnessed Francis in weakness, tender and quiet; could have pushed his auburn hair off his forehead and touched the shell of his ear gently, coyly. 

They had time. 

James listens to the sound of the arctic wind pushing down over the shoals and into the cracks of his tent and imagines the water lapping against the side of a ship. He thinks only of Francis Crozier, and wonders that if they had made it, would he have been able to part from him? He imagines the Sandwich Islands, the warm water and sand. The palms that swayed in the warm breeze. Francis has been to tropical places. 

James thinks he could let the sun turn him brown as a nut and dry out his bones. He would very much like his bones to be dry and warm, instead of bleaching on cold winter shoals. He suddenly feels hazy, sick, as he imagines it; the wind whistling through his skull in the rocks.

James hears the flap of the tent open and Crozier stands in the mouth, darkness behind him like some great maw. 

James thinks of a monster carrying him into its den, deep into the earth and warm and wet where it sleeps away the years. The north is in him now, in all of them, and his very marrow aches with ice and cold. 

He turns and focuses his eyes on Francis, smiling with no teeth, cracked lips pulled over them.

“Oh, come in.”

“How are you holding up?” Francis’s voice rattles around inside of James’s heart like something rolling across the floor of his cabin as the waves toss them up and down on the Atlantic. James keeps his gaze steady on the other man, the way his face looks in the dim light of his tent, broad and open and earnest. 

_A quintessentially Irish face,_ Sir John had said once--and James had smirked at that. Later though, in his cabin, he thought about the freckles at Francis Crozier’s hairline, the gap in his front teeth, the way his eyebrow arched when he laughed or condescended. James had to hold onto the frame of the door, but he eventually was able to convince himself that it was the ocean waves that made his knees weak, and not the man sailing on the ship behind them. 

Even now Francis is handsome, to him, but undeniably wan and tired and worried. 

James realizes that he has waited much too long to answer the question Francis asked, and that is why the man is now searching his face, concerned by the silence. Francis opens his mouth to speak again, features troubled, when James interrupts. “I’ve had your tea all along,” he blurts, before he can properly consider his words. “And the sugar.” 

Francis closes his mouth, then opens it again. James feels tears threatening to rise, a tight warmth in his stomach. He swallows the feeling down hard, and tries to laugh but the sound is mirthless.

“Well, I knew that,” Francis finally responds faintly and James nods, feeling like a child who has been scolded by his father, even though Francis isn’t scolding him. Indeed, he doesn’t appear angry at all. And why would he be? Now, after everything? 

James wonders if he should tell Francis about the holes in his body. He feels like the martyr Sebastian, full of holes and leaking holy light. He wonders, would Francis would see holy light spilling from his seams, or just a necrosis poisoning him slowly? 

He never wanted to look ugly in front of Francis.

Suddenly, he feels Francis place his hand on his shoulder and squeeze. James leans into the touch, starved for affection, for something that will make him feel like he’s wanted, like he’s necessary. He wants Francis to need him, because he feels like he needs Francis. Desperately, right at this very moment.

He feels Francis’s hand slide over his back, across the spot where a cherry sized musket ball rests inside him. He closes his eyes again and thinks of Francis extracting the metal from his flesh. His thoughts wander, dreamlike, and he imagines Francis plucking stars from the sky and giving them to him, setting each one on his palm until he signals that he has enough.

It’s never enough. 

Francis doesn’t protest when James leans his weight against his hip, hand resting on his back, fitting into the grooves of his spine like the latches and moving parts of a Chinese puzzle box, covering the lead in his body like it belongs to him, like his name is etched on it. 

James wants to feel Francis’s hand there when he sleeps, when he wakes, a brand in his skin, a heavy scar to remind him.

_- & let it breed like two finches. _


End file.
